Digital art can be computer generated, scanned or drawn using a tablet and a mouse. In recent times some Digital art has become interactive, allowing the audience a certain amount of control over the final image.

To emulate a work is to devise a way of imitating the original look of the piece by different means. The term can be applied generally to any refabrication of an artwork's components, as is the case with the refabrications and reconfigurations that are essential to the preservation of Conceptual, Minimal, and performative art. In the digital media realm, however, emulation has a specific definition. An emulator is a computer program that "fools" the original code into assuming that it is still running on its original equipment, thus enabling software from an out-of-date computer to run on a contemporary one.

A software license developed by computer scientist Richard Stallman that permits other users to use, copy, modify and distribute the source code, with or without a fee. Free software is often developed with an open source model and/or released under a copyleft license.

Synonym of occurrence. An occurrence is a well-defined, distinct product or a usually rather short activity in time. It is characterized by its lack of fundamental change or evolution and is always part of a larger, more abstract project. The occurrence level corresponds with the artworks and activities that are usually archived and described by institutions as separate entities.

Mass media denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a very large audience such as the population of a nation state. […] it is the sum of the public mass distributors of news and entertainment across media such as newspapers, television, radio, broadcasting. […] Mass media includes Internet media (like blogs, message boards, podcasts, and video sharing) because individuals now have a means to exposure that is comparable in scale to that previously restricted to a select group of mass media producers.

In the computer world, "media" is […] used as a collective noun, but refers to different types of data storage options. Computer media can be hard drives, removable drives (such as Zip disks), CD-ROM or CD-R discs, DVDs, flash memory, USB drives, and yes, floppy disks.

First used in the 1960s in relation to mixed media works that had an electronic element. Andy Warhol’s events staged with the rock group the Velvet Underground, under the title of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which combined music, performance, film and lighting, were described as multi-media. Since the late 1970s multi-media has come to define an artwork that uses a combination of electronic media, which could include video, film, audio and computers.

A networked artwork is designed to be viewed on an electronic communication system, whether a Local Area Network (LAN) or the Internet. Networked media include Web sites, e-mail, and streaming audio and video.

Artwork created with technology that was invented or has become largely accessible since the mid-20th century and uses, among other things, telecommunications, mass media, multimedia or digital transmission. The term new media is distinguished by the artwork’s components, which incorporate more recent technology and most often require electrical power. New media works include such art forms as installation, video art, interactive art and net art.

The term "online art" in many ways corresponds to the strict definition of net art: art that can or should only be experienced online. […] There are two kinds of "online art": art that is only there on the net, or art that is always there on the net - "only" being the stricter criterion since it tends to rule out telerobotics and web cast performances which may have an additionally important offline dimension.

A technique for writing software in which original authors make source code freely available for modification and improvement by any programmer who wishes to collaborate on the project. The most well-known example of open source software is the Linux operating system.

Software that communicates with computer hardware on the most basic level. Without an operating system, no software programs can run. The OS is what allocates memory, processes tasks, accesses disks and peripherals, and serves as the user interface. Thanks to operating systems, like Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, developers can write code using a standard programming interface.

An organized list of instructions that, when executed, causes the computer to behave in a predetermined manner. Without programs, computers are useless. A program is like a recipe. It contains a list of ingredients (called variables) and a list of directions (called statements) that tell the computer what to do with the variables.

A computer script is a list of commands that are executed by a certain program or scripting engine. Scripts may be used to automate processes on a local computer or to generate Web pages on the Web. For example, DOS scripts and VB Scripts may be used to run processes on Windows machines, while AppleScript scripts can automate tasks on Macintosh computers. ASP, JSP, and PHP scripts are often run on Web servers to generate dynamic Web page content. Script files are usually just text documents that contain instructions written in a certain scripting language.

Magnetic tape has been used for sound recording for more than 75 years. Tape revolutionized both the radio broadcast and music recording industries. It did this by giving artists and producers the power to record and re-record audio with minimal loss in quality as well as edit and rearrange recordings with ease.

The most conservative collecting strategy-the default strategy for most museums-is to store a work physically, whether that means mothballing dedicated equipment or archiving digital files on disk. Storing one of Flavin's fluorescent light installations simply means buying a supply of the out-of-production bulbs and putting them in a crate. The major disadvantage of storing obsolescent materials is that the artwork will expire once these ephemeral materials cease to function.

The science and technology of transmitting voice, audio, facsimile, image, video, computer data, and multimedia information over significant distances by the use of electromagnetic energy in the form of electricity, radio or optics.

Variability is an inherent property of digital media and one of the main capabilities artists are drawn to. Artworks in any medium change over time due to things like lighting or chemical decay, but digital media art changes more often, at a faster pace, purposefully, and in ways so immediately observable that they have direct implications for intellectual property.

Videotape is a means of recording images and sound on to magnetic tape […].Tape is a linear method of storing information and, since nearly all video recordings made nowadays are digital, it is expected to gradually lose importance as non-linear/random-access methods of storing digital video data become more common.

A computer that delivers (serves up) Web pages. Every Web server has an IP address and possibly a domain name. For example, if you enter the URL http://www.pcwebopedia.com/index.html in your browser, this sends a request to the server whose domain name is pcwebopedia.com. The server then fetches the page named index.html and sends it to your browser. Any computer can be turned into a Web server by installing server software and connecting the machine to the Internet.